CITY PARKS I’VE KNOWN

(WITH JAZZ INTERLUDE)

Collage by RCS / 2015

Now is always becoming When and Where. Many of us carry a sideways-bent rearview mirror in our mind’s eye. From moment to moment, the past is shaking hands with the future. Wonderment, distance, hearts, and hats. Above our heads are intricate clusters of tree branches, every so often acting as if they’d prefer being a modern sculpture. City Park’s I’ve Known, is an essay I might never write. Fingers make words appear on the screen. Crescent Lake Park is a city park close to downtown St. Petersburg, Florida, with an oval lake in its center, and thirsty lakeside Banyan trees offering a canopy of shade in deepest summertime. I remember wandering nearby side streets and alleys as much as I do the park. Memories become unclouded on overcast days. Upon arriving in New York City for the first time, I checked into the West Side Y, which was just a few steps away from Central Park West and the Columbus Circle entrance. I remember walking through Central Park on my first afternoon in the city, before grabbing a bagel and takeout tea for dinner. A year and a half later, I took the train to Penn Station, and rode up Eighth Avenue to the West Side Y on my ten-speed bike, which had traveled with me on my Amtrak train ride from St. Petersburg to Manhattan. I went for a welcoming myself back to New York City wander through Central Park, in the late May afternoon. First thing, even before moving out of the Y, was signing up for Artistic Anatomy classes at The Art Students League. In my first few weeks in the city, I was far from imagining I’d be on The Early Watch and doing evening security at The Metropolitan Museum of Art by the end of November. The first-floor security route took me through the Egyptian Wing. Imagine being the only person in a dimly-lit section of the museum, conversing with a long-gone mummy housed behind a Plexiglas case. Then, taking a sharp left at the end of Egyptian, and arriving at The Temple of Dendur. From the banks of the Nile to a custom-built museum space large enough to house an ancient temple. Directly next to The Temple of Dendur is a massive angled wall of windows offering a stellar nighttime view of Central Park – best viewed in springtime or during a winter snowstorm. I could be efforting uphill with these same legs and feet in San Francisco, as I did most recently, in 2018 and 2019. One can’t visit San Francisco without stepping into City Lights Bookstore. Washington Square Park is a block or two further uphill on Columbus, just past City Lights. It’s a good spot to sit and have a coffee or tea, and afterwards head uphill on the side streets of North Beach. Naturally, a visit to Golden Gate Park is a good way to spend part of the day. I went to the City by the Bay to see a career-spanning Rauschenberg retrospective at SFMOMA. The first of two visits included meeting up with my friend Kevin. Going to the museum and taking in the exhibit every day for five days was the plan. I’d written down lists of restaurants to try and places to visit, especially if we could find a close-by live jazz venue. Turns out there was a place, just a short, yet confusing walk up the hill from downtown’s Union Square Park. It was drizzly January weather, on our second night in the city. Our destination was an upstairs jazz club called The Burritt Room + Tavern, in the perfectly named Mystic Hotel. Some venues feel like secret hideaways, or in this case a local secret. Especially when they contain music, wine, tall windows, and people enjoying life. Conviviality plus a jazz combo. We sat down next to the window, which was open a crack, letting in the damp breezy air. After selecting two glasses of full-bodied red wine, we focused on the band just beginning to play. There was a Hammond B-3 in the combo, and I’d recently been listening to organ jazz greats like Dr. Lonnie Smith, Jimmy McGriff, Jack McDuff, and Jimmy Smith, so it landed perfectly on my ears. A rainy night spent digging some jazz in the city of so many creative spirits who came before. Mark Twain who wrote for the San Francisco Morning Call while he called San Francisco home in the 1860s, Dashiell Hammett who created the “hard-boiled” style of detective fiction, writing The Maltese Falcon on his kitchen table on Post Street in the 1920s, Miles Davis playing live at The Blackhawk in the Tenderloin in the early 1960s, Allen Ginsberg writing his culture-shifting epic poem Howl, in his apartment on Montgomery Street in North Beach in the mid-1950s, and The Grateful Dead beginning their long strange musical trip in Haight Ashbury in 1965. On that night, we were searching for jazz, and we’d located it. Uphill in the rain, in a room full of people wanting the same. The group consisted of three young guys, with one  playing a stand-up bass, another grooving on the B-3, and a drummer who knew how to swing. We’d found our spot, and knew we’d be back.

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